Capsules

-- Soft, resilient and apparently harmless, rubber balloons seem like ideal toys for toddlers; some kids even like to nibble the knot. But balloons can also be dangerous, report three Honolulu physicians in the journal Pediatrics. Drs. Yi-Chuan Ching, J. Dempsey Huitt and George Nagao say that balloons that burst while being chewed or inflated can explode with such force that fragments of rubber may be propelled back into the mouth and windpipe, causing asphyxiation. The trio base their warning on a review of a score of fatal accidents plus their own observations of two other cases. One two-year-old boy who had been playing with a balloon was found unconscious; hospital personnel who managed to restore his breathing found the balloon in his glottis. A nine-month-old boy left in his crib with an inflated balloon was not so fortunate. When he was found unconscious, his father removed a balloon from the back of his throat. It was too late, however, to save the infant's life.

-- Doctors have always had trouble detecting hairline bone fractures; the fine cracks, most commonly found in the hip and hand, often fail to show up in X-ray pictures. Now the University of Wisconsin's Space Science and Engineering Center has taken the process used to improve the quality of television pictures from the moon and applied it to X-ray photography. The researchers place a conventional X-ray picture in a facsimile transceiver similar to the machine used to transmit wirephotos; there it is "read" by a photoelectric cell and the information fed into a computer programmed to eliminate "noise," or distortion, from the picture. The process sharpens contrasts and emphasizes fine lines, permitting detection of defects that would otherwise go unobserved. The "computer enhancement" process has begun to pay off in diagnosing fractures previously missed by conventional pictures.

-- Few books spur less public debate than medical texts. But there are exceptions to that rule. The authors of The Anatomical Basis of Medical Practice sought to call attention to "certain landmarks the students must recognize" by including in their anatomy book a few photos of nude women splashing in the surf or posing seductively on swings. The resulting volume is closer to Playboy than to Gray's Anatomy. The reaction to the book was predictable. In a letter to the 1,000-member Association of Women in Science (AWIS) of which she is president-elect, Dr. Estelle Ramey of Georgetown University's School of Medicine branded the book "an obscene denigration of women" that "demeans the whole profession of medicine." Many of her colleagues and even some students apparently agreed. When Dr. Ramey proposed a boycott of the book's publisher, Williams & Wilkins decided to revise the titillating tome before a second press run is begun.

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